A UK based podcast for web industry types

It’s been 5 months since our last episode. In that time I’ve become a father (woah) and Mark has become really popular on Instagram. So it’s a sort of catch-up episode, and a moan at each other about Apple, Microsoft, CPU’s and Adobe and software named after disasters.

Not exactly sure what ‘State of the Union’ is, Mark suggested it and I heard it on The West Wing once so sure it’s all good.

Corrections:
– Spectre Vulnerability: When we recorded this and discussed the Spectre and Meltdown CPU exploits, it looked like only Intel Chipsets were at risk. Within days there were identical exploits for most of major chip manufacturers.
– Loscil, producer of my jukebox track DID reply to my tweet… it’s pronounced like ‘fossil’.

My Jukebox pick is a track called ‘Anthropocene’ by Loscil (Monument Builders album, 2017). It’s used in the Iceland surf film ‘Under An Arctic Sky’, a short documentary I recommend whether you’re into surfing or not.

Mark’s tune is ‘Cruise (Don’t Stop)’ from the 1995 Nightmares on Wax album Smokers Delight. Mark says this album was a constant feature in his car in the late 90’s.

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For our 50th anniversary, we skip right to the music with a Jukebox special. Ben and I talk about our favourite and not so favourite tracks on the Relative Paths Alt Playlist, and the regular Relative Paths Playlist, we even cull a few. We also talked about some of our favourite bands, albums, gigs and that sort of thing.

Some of the tracks we talk about are:
‘Age of Consent’ by New Order, from ‘Power, Corruption and Lies’ (1983).
‘All my Friends’ by LCD Soundsystem, from ‘Sound of Silver’ (2007).
‘Enola Gay’ by OMD, from ‘Organisation’ (1980).
‘Aquarius’ by Boards of Canada, from ‘Music has a right to children’ (1998).
‘Sprout and the Bean’ by Joanna Newsom, from ‘The Milk-Eyed Mender’ (2004).
‘Numb’ by Portishead, from ‘Dummy’ (1994).
‘Two Months Off’ by Underworld, from ‘A Hundred Days Off’ (2002).
‘Sleep the Clock Around’ by Belle and Sebastian, from ‘The Boy with the Arab Strap’ (1998).

Why would anyone want to hack my website? This was one of the questions we asked WordPress Platform Lead and Developer Advocate for 34SP.com, Tim Nash. We talked about what the risks are, who’s responsibility web security should be and what we can do to build more secure sites.

Tim gave us two security focused Toolstars. Visualping and Versionista monitor sites for changes. They can be used to ensure your sites haven’t been tampered with.

For our Jukebox picks, Tim chose Postmodern Jukebox’s cover of Meghan Trainor’s ‘All About That Bass’. I Chose ‘Gathers In Puddles’ by Origamibiro, who also very kindly lets us use one of his track as our ‘theme tune’. Ben had no pick this week… bad Ben! They’ll be added to the Relative Paths Alt Playlist, or the Relative Paths Playlist as appropriate.

In this episode we talk about the Progressive Enhancement approach to web design and development with Aaron Gustafson. He talks us through some of the advantages of adopting Progressive Enhancement (PE) versus more traditional approaches. We also discuss barriers that might prevent us using PE and Aaron makes some useful recommendations.

This week’s jukebox picks are definitely going on the Relative Paths Alt Playlist! I started with ‘Bambro Koyo Ganda (featuring Innov Gnawa)’ by Bonobo. Mark then gave us ‘Kick Jump Twist’ by Sylvan Esso. Brilliant and needed an immediate second listen. Finally Aaron hit us with post-punk classic ‘Teen Age Riot’ by Sonic Youth, and a great story. He also urged us to check out The Chameleons following his Instagram vid of ‘Script Of The Bridge’ on deck.

This was one of the most interesting, thoughtful and funny conversations we’ve had. We spoke to Chris Coyier about dogmatism (the expression of an opinion or belief as if it were a fact) in the web industry. We talked about why it happens, what we can to do be less dogmatic ourselves and how to deal with dogmatic people and their bombastic opinions.

Our Toolstar this week was CodePen Projects, zero setup, full-featured front end web development environment, right in the browser. Chris talked us through it, and it sounds pretty great. We like all the CodePen things.

It was a diverse Jukebox this week. I chose ‘A Tender History In Rust’ by Do Say Make Think. Ben chose ‘Eve’ by Anchorsong, it’s very Ben. And Chris chose ‘The Stable Song’ by Gregory Alan Isakov, and had a very cool story of meeting him IRL. They’ll be added to the Relative Paths Alt Playlist, or the Relative Paths Playlist as appropriate.

This week we talk CSS Grid with the amazing and great Rachel Andrew, who has been leading the charge with grid for a while now. We talked about the origin of Grid, what we’ll be able to do with it and when it’s going to be ready to use (sooner that we realised). We also talked about how she got started as a developer, her work with the W3C CSS Working Group, and of course Perch CMS (my favorite).

Our Toolstar is a CSS Grid Layout learning resource, Grid By Example. It’s a repository of tutorials, articles, videos and resources for learning grid managed by Rachel (I don’t know how she gets so much stuff done).

It’s a Bristol sound themed Jukebox this week. My pick was ‘Glory Box’ by Portishead. Ben went for ‘Black Steel’, a Public Enemy track covered by Tricky with vocalist Martina Topley-Bird. They’ll be added to the Relative Paths Alt Playlist. The original Relative Paths Playlist is also available for you to code along to.

This week we tackle the often thorny subject of SEO, with local dev and friend of the show Elliott Richmond. We intended this to be a bit of a potted guide to SEO, but we think it ended up being a far more interesting discussion.

My Toolstar this week is Instafeed.js, a really simple way to add Instagram images to your site. We also talked about Elliott’s own Insta Grabagram WordPress plugin.

My Jukebox pick this week is ‘REM Sleep Research’ by Ochre, Elliott picked ‘Melt’ by Leftfield, and Ben went for ‘Flow’ by Sun Glitters & Nadine Carina. They’ll be added to the original Relative Paths Playlist for you to code along to. The Relative Paths Alt Playlist is also available for your non-coding needs.

After a break at the end of 2016, we’ve start 2017 with a bit of a retrospective. Mark and I had a fairly busy year and we take a look at some of the things we did, didn’t do, tried and failed.

There’s no Toolstar as such this time, but we acknowledge Trello as being generally pretty good!

My Jukebox pick is the first 12″ single I bought, Future Sound of London’s ‘Papua New Guinea’. Mark’s pick is ‘Jed’s other poem’ by Grandaddy, in celebration of the band reforming! Both tracks will be added to the Relative Paths Alt Playlist.

This week Ben and I are joined by Front End (or is that Front-End) developer Clive Walker to talk about Perch CMS. We have a lot of positive things to say about it, it’s powerful and flexible, but easy to use. We also talk about Perch’s many free add-ons, including the recently added Perch Shop e-commerce platform. Just so you know, we’re not being sponsored by Perch, we just really like it. It’s become my CMS of choice, and I reckon it’s well worth trying out. Clive also tells us about the Perchology newsletter, which contains all sorts of goodies for Perch developers, and the Horsham Co-Working project.

Clive’s Toolstar is Curated, an app for putting together a digest newsletter, which Clive uses to create the Perchology newsletter.

My Jukebox choice this time is a solid gold classic, Teardrop by Massive Attack. Clive’s pick is Big Calm, the whole album, by Morcheeba (we’ll pick a track for the playlist). Ben didn’t have a track this week, bad Ben! Clive and my tracks will be added to the Relative Paths Alt Playlist.

Following Apple’s New MacBook announcement on Oct 27th 2016, we felt the need to discuss the matter of PC vs Mac again. Things have changed since last time (Relativepaths – 35-pc-versus-mac-versus-sandals). Then I was sure I was going to switch to Mac, but now I’m not so sure.

My Jukebox choice this time is ‘Rustling and Pure’ by Cass, a return to form from me after a few polarising picks. Ben’s choice is ‘Butterflies’ by Anchorsong. Both make their way onto the Relative Paths Playlist.